Joining an innovation workshop is a big ask.

Your colleagues are busy so you need to make sure everything goes well.

How?

In these reflections, you’ll find out about useful activities that will help you design a successful innovation workshop.

4 activities to start your innovation workshop

The start of an innovation workshop is a chance to set the tone for the day.

How?

At this moment, you can remind the participants about:

• Why they’re in the room
• What they’re going to do
• What the workshop will feel like

What if you could actually convince your boss?

I know…

From playing the game of politics to slow decision-making to lack of time, we often face many obstacles at work. 😣

It can be hard.

So here are 11 effective tips to persuade your boss to make change happen.

People who’ve used these tips got their boss to implement new ideas and made an impact at work. This is a guide to help you make innovation happen too.

Warning: you are NOT going to find anything about being a bootlicker (dull) or working hard (boring) here.

Have you ever tried feedback analysis?

Feedback analysis is the process of setting up objectives for yourself and reviewing how you performed.

It is the best way to get out of your comfort zone, but still being in control. It’s also a great way to set small personal growth goals and reach them.

“If you cannot measure it, you won’t be able to manage it.”

— Business saying often attributed to Peter Drucker

In this article, we’ll explore how you can do your own feedback analysis.

Sharing constructive feedback gives you this ability to guide your team members and help them learn and grow.

Unfortunately, we never learn how to give feedback. We assume that it is intuitive; and that you should naturally master this skill.

But in practice, giving feedback feels uncomfortable.

We even often avoid doing it…

[In these reflections, I focus on “individual feedback” given to a team member (e.g. superior, peer, or subordinate). This excludes traditional employee review, team performance check-in, and managing yourself with feedback analysis.]

Feedback is an undervalued tool.

Gathering the best books for entrepreneurs and other great resources wasn’t an easy job.

You will agree with me that there are so many books about entrepreneurship out there…

So I narrowed down the list only to the best resources. This is going to save you so much time. ?

If you like these recommendations, share it with your friends, classmates, and colleagues.

 

The following lists focus on the crème de la crème of resources and books for entrepreneurs and executives.

Running a workshop is an effective way to train a group or get them to do collaborative work.

But there’s still lots of misunderstanding around how to do this.

As part of running innovation projects at What If, we use workshops as a tool to harvest and leverage the creativity of our project teams.

Though I cannot recreate online the exciting experience of participating in one of these workshops, I wanted to share with you some of the most useful things you can implement in your workshops.

Knowing how to deliver a great speech is an essential skill for a leader.

Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Barack Obama… They are great speakers. We all remember them for how they spoke in public.

But we don’t deliver speeches to such large audiences every day. Right?

We’re more likely to talk to the team we lead, to present something to stakeholders, or to speak at an event.

So it’s good to use these public figures to inspire us. But we also need practical tools to improve how we convey a message or tell a story.

For more than 9 years, I’ve been writing to educate, convince, inspire, negotiate, and sell.

Here are 16 practical things you can apply to improve your writing…

16 Useful Things that Will Help to Sell and Convince through Writing

1. Know who you’re writing to.

Who is going to read? What are they interested in? Keep one reader in mind. You shouldn’t address a group but just one reader.

2. Value your readers’ time more than yours.

Each piece should be the one that your reader shouldn’t miss regarding a specific topic. If not, there’s no reason to hit “publish” or “send”.

As a team leader, you must agree:

Constantly making sure that your team remains engaged and motivated is a real challenge, especially since we’re all so busy.

Here’s a simple solution to know how they feel:

Organise a Team Retrospective with your team.

How to Run Your Next Team Retrospective: The Clearing Session

At the end of every week, meet with your team and ask these two questions:

1. What is not working for you?
2. What is working for you?

One person at a time answers the first question. And when everyone is done—you included—the team starts answering the second question.

 

Creativity is key in established businesses as well as startups.

The former needs to find new areas of growth while leveraging and fighting against its structural inertia, whilst the latter must deal with initial fragility.

Problem: many idea killers prevent innovation from happening.

In many cases, brainstorming is one of these idea killers.

Let’s see why.

Creating and implementing new ideas are essential, core competencies in today’s business world. As Rita Gunther McGrath explains in her book The End of Competitive Advantage: